PhD Thesis by Anna Gerge: Psychotherapeutic development

This article-based thesis reports the development of an assessment tool, the SATPA – a Safety Assessment Tool of Pictorial Artefacts, for determining levels of safety in pictures in line with the concept neuroception, defined as a continuous, partially unaware assessment of whether situations are safe, worrying or life-threatening.

Psychotherapeutic development – Assessment of pictures through development of the SATPA – a safety assessment tool of pictorial artefacts

PhD Thesis By Anna Gerge

In the linking text and in seven papers, four published and three submitted, theoretical writings about trauma and regulation are presented, including the value and need of the experience of safety in psychotherapeutic processes, and arguments for creating an assessment tool focused on regulation and safety.

Deductive content analyses of 269 pictures conducted by 122 clinicians as informants and arts-based research finalized the SATPA, incorporating 11 perspectives related to a neuroception of safety, ambiguity/worry, or plain terror/collapse.

The SATPA was hypothesized to add to knowledge on how to facilitate the process of retaken health, especially when focusing on implicit knowledge and the perception of safety. SATPA offers a detailed model, yet not too rigid, in reading and interpretation, incorporating the first person and third person perspective, and is a tool for those interested in pictures as proxy measures of images, inner working models and neurophenomenology.

The gathered knowledge of this thesis hopefully heightens the image’s and the arts-based psychotherapies’ certain value in the field of treatment of dysregulated patients, including those traumatized.